Between art and the languages of advertising there has always been a game of attraction and repulsion that, with some luck, will end up in some sort of free love or extremely loose relationship. Both have benefited mutually, although some times it is impossible to tell where one starts or where the others end. While the languages of advertising have more access to galleries and art museums, art seems more anxious to win over the dominions of advertising.

It is in this crossroads where, in the last few years, Héctor de Anda has established the subject matter of his paintings. If when he approached the physical decay of billboards ( espectaculares in Spanish) as his subject, they looked like models who, through aging, had become sublimely abstract, today De Anda's interest is more profound and, curiously enough, more spectacular. As the latest options of that art which questions the structures of its own language and perception, De Anda has confronted the enigma of the deconstruction of images and thus of the illusion of reality. He has centered it in a phenomenon particularly associated to that visual language depicted in his painting and consisting of the transition where the image of advertisements on billboards is disarticulated and rearranged in such a way to make it illegible. These enormous “domino” jumbles, so common in cities and highways, have suggested De Anda that even incoherent images are ruled by a code not very different from those used in international espionage and therefore equally intriguing.

This process of concealing images or making them illegible—equivalent to disassembling and displaying the image's instruments of seduction—exercises paradoxically its own fascination, although this time in the area of the possibilities of the commutation of language in search of new meanings. The form and shape that become abstract when fragmented and the messages that once taken apart reveal the expressive purity of the sign free of the rigors of grammar are the elements in Héctor de Anda's paintings. He handles them with an imagination for composition that overflows his models and broadens the possibilities of prolonging the enigma and awakening a desire that will be fulfilled, but only in the dominion of painting.

Bits of letters and numbers, strange marriages between fragmented forms, “incoherent” unions and oppositions among colors are presented by De Anda as regular pieces of a puzzle, as fascinating as the challenge of guessing their original meaning and that of speculating over the new connotation of the deconstruction-reconstruction process.

Luis Carlos Emerich